Personal electronic devices provide enjoyment and utility for all ages. Available interfaces between humans and devices, however, remain limiting. Input devices and user interfaces for computers, cell phones, and other electronics remain a bottleneck with respect to speed and ease of use, and usually require a level of manual dexterity. Conventional keyboards, touch screens, and computer mice require at least some training, and remain a cumbersome link between the nimbleness of human thought and the brute speed of an electronic processor. Speech recognition and visual gesture recognition that generate digital input for devices are improvements, but humans can think and speak much faster than most input devices can capture, and electronic devices can process data much faster that human input devices can send. Thus, there is a gap between the world of humans and the electronic devices they use.
Contrary to expectations, providing an easy user interface for electronic communication devices has become more difficult as the devices have become more sophisticated. Increased processing power provides smaller devices and increased mobility. Thus, the physical footprint of the human interface has merely become smaller, not always better. The reduced size often requires even more manual dexterity and more focus in order to generate accurate input. The miniaturized “qwerty” keyboard of a cell phone is very compact, an advantage, but requires a great deal of focus to achieve both speed and satisfactory accuracy of the message being created. Typing is sometimes performed with two thumbs. Touching icons on a display to actuate functions is an improvement over typing individual letters, but when a human-readable message needs to be generated, the cell phone or tablet device often pops up a virtual qwerty-style keyboard in miniature.